


Everything Else Can Wait

by claquesous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cuddling, F/M, Gen, Kissing, M/M, Multi, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexually tense sparring, this hints and winks at polyamory but doesn't quite go there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 15:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10902039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claquesous/pseuds/claquesous
Summary: Something came unstuck in Bucky’s chest and unstoppered joy rushed dizzyingly through him. He had died a dozen times, lived a dozen different lives, and yet here Steve was after all of it, as bafflingly ready as always to drop everything for Bucky—whichever version of him still stood, or not.





	Everything Else Can Wait

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote and finished this a year ago, idk why i didn't post it

“You know,” said Natasha, sounding not at all out of breath. She socked him hard, shoulder-chest-stomach, and sent him swaying backwards. “You will have to talk about it eventually.”

“Eventually,” Bucky wheezed. He knocked Natasha’s hands off his shoulders before she could vault onto them and squeeze the life out of him with her beautiful, deadly thighs. Not that you could ever experience that too many times, but he wanted to put up something of a fight first.

“With  _ someone _ ,” she relented. She volunteered with a shrug between vicious roundhouses to his ribs. Bucky wrenched his upper body back out of the blast radius, in the vain hope she’d follow through and lose her balance. She didn’t. In fact, she straightened, abandoning anything resembling elite martial arts and pushed him right over with two fingers, smirking. He smoothed the fall into a roll, back on his feet in half a second, but Natasha was a step ahead of him. She tackled him before he could rebalance, pinning him with all her weight on his sternum. 

Bucky glared. It was possible he could have overpowered her with two arms—optimistic, but possible, especially with the metal one—but she was too slippery to catch with one. He grumbled but allowed her to haul him to his feet.

He slung his arm around her shoulders. “Thanks, Romanoff.”

“For kicking your ass?”

Bucky ignored this. “Anyway, who kicks  _ your _ ass?”

“Barton, on a good day.” Her mouth twitched. “You should give it a try, one of these days.”

He drew back indignantly. “All right, Romanoff. Maybe I will.”

Bucky knew in the abstract that they had known each other for years, but those years had fallen through the cracks in his shattered brain. He didn’t remember anything specific about her, but she still felt familiar. These days, that made her half of a very small crowd. And since he was still jittery around Steve, thanks to a deadly cocktail of self-loathing and -mistrust, Natasha was the least taxing company.

He was also lonely as hell, so he very well might have tried to—

“Whoa there, Barnes.” She leaned away from him with a cocked eyebrow. “Remember that thing about talking?” She gestured at him with an unnecessarily thorough sweep of her eyes. “ _ This _ only gets to happen after the talking.”

Bucky growled, leaning away from her. “Fine.”

“Did I miss out on the ass-kicking?” Steve asked from behind them, sounding slightly strangled.

Natasha shot Bucky a scathing glare. He returned it; she should have heard him too. The line of her eyebrows softened from violent to churlish.

“Definitely not,” she assured him, shrugging out of Bucky’s embrace in a way that made him pout on principle. “Would you like it kicked by me, or him?”

Bucky laughed. “That’s awful sweet of you.”

“What?” Steve asked with a grin, rolling his shoulders. “Don’t think you can kick it as soundly as Natasha?”

Bucky raised his hand in surrender. “Absolutely not. Stubborn little scrap’s attitude and Captain America’s body? I’m not an idiot.”

“You’re full of shit, Barnes,” Natasha said fondly. Her smile turned slightly evil as she glanced between the two of them. She stepped gracefully off the mat where Bucky was anxiously shifting his weight, and to his half-surprise Steve stepped onto it.

“Come on,” Steve said, grinning as he sunk into a defensive stance. “I’m curious.”

“You’ve already fought me,” Bucky pointed out. “What’s there to be curious about?”

“I haven’t fought  _ you _ ,” Steve said.

Bucky frowned, feeling that this was an exaggeration. “All right.”

Steve lunged immediately, and Bucky swiveled to the side, landing a hefty punch to the jaw.

“Rude,” he grunted, and Bucky grinned, relaxing. He swung a knee up for Steve’s solar plexus but Steve recovered before Bucky could make contact, twisting his leg and knocking Bucky off balance. Steve didn’t seize the opportunity to lay him out but instead took a few steps back and Natasha booed.

“Come on, Rogers, don’t be a gentleman.”

“Oh, that wasn’t a choice.” Bucky couldn’t resist teasing him. “He was born that way.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Steve chuckled as he launched another punch.

They traded blows for a few minutes, but the dance was halting and rushed. They’d known each other so well that seventy years ago they would have been parrying blows before they even happened. Bucky’s intervening seventy had rearranged all but the most foundational parts of him, but apparently Bucky had missed the day when Steve finally figured out the world was a one-way mirror. With a sudden bold step forward Steve swung for his face, an easily dodged right hook that almost made Bucky roll his eyes. Steve grinned when Bucky discovered his other fist ready for his gut when Bucky leaned back out of the way of the punch.

Wilson, who had appeared at some point, was snickering before Steve even made contact. Clearly he had fallen prey to this very move or at least watched somebody else do so. This ruined Bucky’s mood.

“Shit, Stevie,” Bucky cough-laughed, and Steve straightened at the nickname. Bucky low-key panicked and slammed his fist into Steve’s side, bruising his knuckles on ribs. He gasped and shook out his hand. “Christ, are your bones vibranium, too?”

Steve smiled sheepishly and shrugged, looking not the least bit wounded. “I haven’t broken anything since 1943.”

“Except my hand,” Bucky complained, scowling half-heartedly.

“Don't forget my pride and dignity,” Wilson piped up.

Steve unsuccessfully stifled a smile; at which of them, Bucky wasn’t sure.

“You’ll live,” Natasha laughed.

“That was very different than fighting the Winter Soldier,” Steve said softly, this addressed to the room at large until the tail end, when his eyes darted skittishly up to Bucky’s.

Bucky’s chest hurt.

Wilson coughed.

Natasha glared at Wilson.

“Natasha?” Bucky asked after a beat of silence. “Can we talk?”

Steve looked like his chest hurt, too. Bucky left the room as fast as he could without running.

* * *

“What the fuck, Barnes?” Natasha asked as she entered the locker room. She turned her back pointedly as Bucky stepped out of the shower and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. “That was a perfectly adequate opportunity.”

“For what?” he asked irritably. “Wilson to humiliate me?”

“To come clean,” Natasha said, equally irritated. “Tell him how you feel.”

“ _ I _ don’t even know how I feel.”

“Well, I do,” she scoffed.

“How do I feel?” Bucky demanded.

Natasha turned to address him, her take-no-shit face on, which was to say, she looked like she always did, if a little pissed. “He’s the only thing in this century that doesn’t make you miss home”—he would have interrupted her if not for the distinct feeling that she knew exactly what home was to him: dawn and dusk, curled hair, foggy pint glasses, rumpled uniforms, old-Steve’s knobby shoulders, coarse pillowcases, offensively red lipstick, street lamps and constellations—“and you both need to quit pretending you don’t miss each other like hell.” Her eyes made the last, unsaid bit unambiguous:  _ You love him. _

Bucky didn’t deny it, but he couldn’t pretend the past seventy years hadn’t changed anything. He wasn't the same person, as much as he wanted to be. Neither of them were.

And then there was Wilson. Bucky felt like he’d seen something private. Fighting was not something he did for fun anymore, not with just anyone. He had weird pressure points, emotionally and physically, that Natasha and (for the most part) Steve knew to avoid. Wilson did not know the rules for Bucky’s space and had gotten in anyway. And with “Stevie,” Bucky had exposed and labeled several loose wires to poke at. And of course that was the extent of the situation only if he ignored the many hints that Steve was already sleeping with him. Bucky didn’t even know how to feel about that, so he didn’t.

Natasha threw up her hands. “I don't know what else to say to you.” Her glare sharpened. “Except that trying to kiss me in front of Steve isn't gonna make your life any easier.”

“What about kissing you out of his sight?” Bucky asked, half-heartedly lascivious. Every now and then he did this: tried to impersonate the man—kid, really—he’d been before. It never felt quite right, but this attempt felt especially wrong.

Natasha gave him a long look. Bucky wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “I'm not going to keep your bed warm, if that's what you have in mind.”

Bucky sighed, shaking his head. “I know.”

Natasha turned to go, and at the door, paused and said, “Don't break his heart, Barnes. Neither of us could take that.”

* * *

Steve watched Bucky go with an unbearable hollow feeling, like there was space in his chest that shouldn't be there. Natasha gave a slippery but sympathetic shrug and followed Bucky. 

“Just how hard did you hit him?” Sam finally asked.

Steve sighed. The hardest part about the whole Bucky situation was how little Sam understood it. What he'd managed to gather from stories and gossip were either blatantly untrue or so old they weren't about the same Bucky Barnes, and Steve couldn’t bring himself to talk about it for very long.

“He's trying,” Steve said shortly, not sure how or if he had planned to end that sentence. 

“Hey,” Sam said, abruptly gentle. Steve looked up. “I know. We all are.” His eyes bit the dust for a second and he looked almost embarrassed. “I'm just a jealous son of a bitch.”

“Jealous?” Steve's mind refused to supply the implications of this. “Of what?”

Sam raised his eyebrows with his whole body: his head tilted forward so he could roll his eyes without breaking eye contact, and his weight shifted from one foot to the other, kicking his hip out insolently. “You’re shitting me, right?” he finally asked. 

Steve blushed. “It's not—we—”

Sam snorted, in as good a humor as Steve supposed he could manage. “Don't tell me it's not like that. I've seen the way you look at him.”

The space in Steve's chest hogged more of his chest cavity. “Bucky was all I had for most of my life,” he finally said. 

“You don't have to explain.” Sam shrugged. “You had Bucky, I had Riley. I know how I’d be if he came back.” He stared moodily off into the distance.

“Still, I—you deserve an explanation.”

Sam shook his head, looking back at Steve. “I’ll get to know him myself.” He cracked a smile full of brilliant white teeth. “Now that I know he’s got me beat, I don’t have to be a dick about it.”

Steve gave a perplexed sigh. “It’s not a competition, Sam. You’re my friend.”

“Sure it’s not,” Sam said wryly. “But I know I’ll never be on that level.”

Steve blinked. “Well of course not,” he said, and hurried on when Sam turned a very sour face on him. “You both have your own levels. It's not a question of room.” He searched for words. “You can never be what Bucky is to me. But Bucky can never be what you are to me.”

Sam looked about as close to flustered as Steve had ever seen him. “I appreciate that, Steve.” His smirk softened into a more sincere smirk. “I really do.”

Steve put a hand on his shoulder, felt like an asshole, and pulled him into a hug.

* * *

“So,” Steve said, sidling up next to Natasha the next morning for coffee. It wasn’t very good—or at least, Steve didn’t like it—but it was the only caffeine strong enough to have any effect whatsoever on him. The same went for at least half the inhabitants of the tower, and the other half were Tony, Clint, Darcy, and Sam, so everybody kept drinking it.

“So, you two, fondue?” Steve finally asked. He didn’t know what else to say. The question was as stupid as it sounded, but he had to know.

“What?” Natasha gave him a smirk with crooked eyebrows.

“You and Bucky…?”

“Steve,” she said, in a tone that would have been unbearably condescending from anyone else but from her just sounded endeared. “No. Barnes… Bucky is just freaked out. All the time. Friendly faces are… pretty much nonexistent.”

A friendly face? Natasha? Since when? Had Steve put too much pressure on him, or not enough? Had he somehow communicated that he expected the old Bucky? Had he—?

“Steve,” Natasha cut in as she saw his expression cycle through dismay and disappointment and many other dis- words very quickly. “Just… talk to him. Before you decide you’ve got him figured out.”

This stung, but Steve knew she was right. Natasha touched his arm and left him slouching at the counter in front of the giant supercaffeine contraption.

“On your left,” shook him out of his momentary crisis. Sam tended to do that.

“Sorry,” Steve chuckled. He scooped up his Wonder Woman mug and slid out of the way.

“Fondue,” Sam said after a moment, very focused on pouring his coffee. 

“Shut up,” Steve grumbled, stifling a smile. 

“No, really, is that like, forties slang? I've never heard it used like that.” Half hidden behind his Teen Titans Cyborg mug, Sam's face was so perfectly straight that Steve almost thought he was serious. 

Almost. 

* * *

Bucky was in the kitchen with a knife at three the next morning. For a while he absently flipped and twirled it and glared at the apple on the counter. Bucky tried slicing the skin off of the apple just sitting on the counter, but it rolled wherever he tried to cut it. He held the apple between his teeth, skin and all, and tried again. He couldn’t see for shit and finally the bite in his mouth broke off and the apple fell to the floor. He had to eat the bite with the skin on it. He was about ready to throw it away and call it a night when soft footsteps came down the stairs.

“Buck?”

Bucky turned in surprise, possibly still glaring. “Hey, Stevie.”

Steve tensed for a second and then relaxed. “Nobody calls me that anymore.” He saw the apple on the floor and connected the dots. “I miss it.” He nodded at the knife clenched in Bucky’s fist. “Need a—Need help?”

“If you were gonna say ‘Need a hand,’ I swear to god, Rogers.” He shook his head, but he was grinning.

Steve hunched his shoulders, laughing. “Not on purpose, I promise.”

Bucky flipped the knife handle over blade and passed it to Steve.

Steve scooped the apple off the floor and took it to the sink to rinse it off. Bucky would have snorted if it wasn’t such a goddamned  _ Steve _ thing to do. He kicked up the lid of the trash can and made quick work of the skin, leaving neat red circles at each pole. He tossed it to Bucky, who bit into it with a juicy crunch.

“Thank you,” he juggled the words with the quarter apple in his mouth. Steve smiled softly, briefly at Bucky and then at the floor.

Bucky had inhaled most of the apple before Steve spoke again. “You know, Buck, Tony could fix you up another arm, one”—Bucky made a face—“that’s not a weapon.”

Bucky chewed for a moment, thoughtful. “I just… I don’t even know what  _ this _ one’s going to do next time I have a bad dream.” He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t need any help tearing a place up.”

“You haven’t relapsed once since Zemo,” Steve said.

Bucky shrugged, eyes on the floor. “Not long enough to do any damage.”

“You  _ won’t _ do any damage,” Steve said, sounding strained.

“You trust me—”

“Yes, I do.”

“—too much.”

“You don’t trust yourself enough.”

Bucky gave him a pleading look. “Well I haven’t given anyone a very good reason to trust me, have I?”

Steve took a step forward before he seemed to think better of it and stopped. “You saved my life. After half a century of abuse and gaslighting.”

“I wouldn’t call leaving you for dead ‘saving your life’,” Bucky protested, his chest tight.

“But you  _ didn’t _ ,” Steve breathed, suddenly very close, and Bucky could feel the little puff of air that punctuated the T against his nose. Steve’s shaking hands came up to his face, slowly, like he was trying not to frighten a wild animal. Which he was. He pressed his palms to Bucky’s cheeks. “You pulled me out of that river. I would have drowned.” Their foreheads came together and Steve didn't blink.

Bucky gripped Steve’s wrist and eased forward until he felt the heat of his mouth. Other than the roaring butterflies in his stomach, everything in him was finally quiet. Bucky would have been content to stay, mouths pressed together in still silence, but Steve didn’t stop. He put down kiss after kiss, each lighting in a slightly different place like the pages in a flipbook.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky finally sighed through the onslaught, afraid he might be crying.

Steve bit his lip sharply and hissed into Bucky’s gasp: “Don’t be.” His hands curled around the back of his neck and pulled him closer into kisses that choked and suffocated him in the most beautiful way. Another half a century later Steve surfaced to continue: “Don’t you ever apologize for what those sons of bastards did to you. Not to me.” He pulled back just enough to turn a smudge of eyelash into individual filaments and make sure Bucky heard him. He tried to avoid Steve’s gaze with another kiss, but Steve held him in place with a handful of hair. “I mean it, Buck.”

Bucky was definitely crying now, choking on the devastating relief that at least one person might ever trust him again. It felt wrong to let himself have this one forgiveness, but Steve didn’t kiss him again until he saw Bucky receive it willingly.

They stood there in the dark, empty kitchen, kissing until the tears dried and Bucky's lips were numb. It was unbearably nice to touch and be touched. His memories were in ruins but he was pretty sure he hadn't been kissed in a few decades. And to be kissed, now, like he mattered, by Steve. It almost felt like they were back in their old world, with a very different but familiar set of problems that they had mostly worked out day-to-day solutions for: how to get rent to the landlord every month without sacrificing the Friday night drinks or the double dates; where to find Steve a new set of papers to show the recruiters; how to get through the night with only a few nightmares; how to keep each other safe when they threw themselves into battle more times than any sane human being.

Bucky was so intent on the slightly different taste of Steve's mouth that he didn’t notice Darcy until she nearly dropped her coffee mug in the sink, despite a valiant effort not to disturb them. She made a face at them, at once apologetic and diabolical, grabbed her coffee, and shuffled back into the elevator.

Steve chuckled and leaned back against the counter, tugging Bucky’s waist with him. He rubbed his face against Bucky's stubbly neck. “Hope you don't regret this in the morning, because everybody’ll know about it.”

Bucky gave an exhausted huff of a laugh and ran his fingers through Steve's hair. “I won't.”

“Come to bed with me,” Steve whispered, drawing a line up Bucky's neck with his nose. “However you want.” The fingers crawling up the back of his shirt suggested which way Steve wanted to go, but Bucky knew he meant it. “I just, need you to stay with me.”

Something came unstuck in Bucky’s chest and unstoppered joy rushed dizzyingly through him. He had died a dozen times, lived a dozen different lives, and yet here Steve was after all of it, as bafflingly ready as always to drop everything for Bucky—whichever version of him still stood, or not.

A sudden thought had him smirking wryly and Steve tilted his head. “What?”

Bucky rolled his eyes in the direction of his metal stub of an arm, and chuckled, “I can’t pick you up.”

Steve laughed. He scooped Bucky up, carried him into the elevator, and pushed him up against the wall. Bucky was laughing, soft and low, even while he was being thoroughly and joyfully kissed. He also felt like he might start crying again. Steve didn’t stop kissing him until the elevator had opened on their floor, waited for them, closed, and started for another floor.

“Damn it,” Steve murmured against his mouth. He tried to find the right button without detaching himself from Bucky’s face but finally he gave a huge sigh and hooked his chin over Bucky’s shoulder to peck at the glowing buttons.

Steve lowered him onto the bed about thirty kisses later, absurdly gentle. His lips buzzed against Bucky’s as he whispered, “How can I make you feel good, Buck?”

“I can’t...” Bucky squirmed. His tone pushed Steve away, which had not been the goal. He tugged him back, pressed their foreheads together even as he avoided eye contact. “I don’t know if I remember how to feel good.”

“Buck,” Steve breathed, rolling them onto their sides and pulling him closer. “I’ll show you.” He kissed Bucky again and again, everywhere. “This, you deserve this.”

Fuck, he was crying again.

Steve cradled Bucky’s head in the crook of his arm. “We have all kinds of time to figure it out,” he said, his lips tickling Bucky’s forehead.

Bucky curled his arm around Steve’s waist and hung on for dear life. “You’re here,” he managed. “Everything else can wait.” He cried himself out on Steve’s shirt and Steve kissed the tears away and licked the salt from his skin. Bucky fell asleep feeling safer, both in the sense that he was safe and that others were safe from him, than he had in decades.

* * *

Bucky woke to the scratch of stubble against the nape of his neck. Upon further observation there were knees tucked under his and Steve’s fingers playing with the hair below his navel.

Bucky sighed. “I miss you.” He hadn't meant to whisper, but his vocal chords just didn't catch.

Steve pulled him closer and Bucky felt his hot breath and then his lips against his neck. “You missed me?” he murmured.

Bucky let his eyes close again and Steve’s hand ran up his chest. “No,” Bucky sighed. “I miss you.” It settled around his throat, soft and cool and gentle as he pulled Bucky’s head back around to kiss him. “Right now.”

Steve smiled against his cheek. “I’m right here.” The kiss was sloppy and out of alignment and perfect. “I will always be right here.” Bucky felt like a man dying of thirst pouring water all over his face. It felt greedy and wasteful but—“As long as you want me.”—this was _ Steve _ , and Steve wasn't rationed. He might not be here forever, but he was here now, and it didn’t look like he was walking away. As long as Bucky had Steve, he couldn't starve if he tried.


End file.
